Aladin, an open source all sky browser

Boch, Thomas

Aladin, developed over 10 years at CDS, has evolved from a simple sky atlas to become a rich and powerful portal able to access, visualize and manipulate images and catalogue data. Aladin is widely used in the Virtual Observatory community and beyond.

Version 7 of Aladin is open source, and recent developments have been focused to enable all-sky browsing targetted towards real scientific usage. Hierarchical, multi-resolution image surveys, density maps and catalogues have been created for popular datasets (DSS, Sloan images ; Simbad, 2MASS catalogs). We will demonstrate how users can also easily build their own all-sky sphere from a set of local FITS images.

Specific applications for the Aladin tool can be developped as external plugins. The example of an SED (Spectral Energy Distribution) plugin will be presented. It combines fluxes extracted from calibrated images in Aladin into SEDs.